Events

Five Sessions, 2.5 hours (6:30PM-9:00PM)
Tuesdays*, February 20th, 27th, March 6th**, March 20th, March 27th
Fees & Payment Options: $270 General/$240 Member (JOIN THE FANCLUB!)
Registration Deadline: February 13th, 2018
*There will be no class on March 13th.
**On March 6th, class will run 7PM-9PM.REGISTER HEREWhy You Should Take This Class: In recent years, scientists have found that memory and imagination call upon the same “default network” in the brain, suggesting that the recreation of memory is not merely an act of retrieval, but also one of imaginative projection. Philosophers and artists have long noted that memory is mutable territory, its topographical features dependent entirely on the stories we tell ourselves. Another way to think about narrative is that it provides an account for how we got to the present moment, reaffirming once again that we were here, here, and here, which means that the next logical turn should be over there. Well-worn paths may be familiar, but not all are safe or lead to happy endings. Sometimes boundaries shift after a storm, or new mountains erupt into the horizon. When this happens, narrative becomes a necessary navigation tool to help us travel from past to future.
Course Description: In this class, we will approach narrative writing as mapmakers of memory: We will visit the terrain, determine our location, establish the scale, insert symbols, and learn how to refine what we have mapped. We will read essays, theoretical texts, and memoir excerpts to explore each of these concepts and skills, and reinforce them through discussion and in-class exercises. Finally, we will apply these skills in workshop by generating meaningful and constructive feedback that will provide a foundation for further exchange and collaboration.
Blending elements of memoir and sports writing, Anelise Chen’sSo Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press, 2017) is an experimental work that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hyponemata, or “notes to the self,” in the form of observations, reminders and self-exhortations. The book follows graduate student Athena Chen who hears that her college friend has committed suicide. A former Open City Fellow of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, she is now fiction editor of AAWW's online publication The Margins. Read her writing about Tao Lin and interviewing the owner of a Chinatown dumpling shop. She teaches writing at Columbia University...

How does what we know influence our quest for love? Three years into a graduate program in science, the narrator of Weike Wang’s critically-acclaimed Chemistry (Knopf, 2017) cooly compares receiving a marriage proposal from her boyfriend to the careful problem solving that occurs between lab partners. The eccentric protagonist of Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) — the last in a line of “anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts” who took refuge in books amidst the tragedy of regime change and exile — mines the wisdom of her literary icons and takes on various pilgrimages to come to terms with her lost family and the possibility of a love. Come for a reading with these two authors and a discussion about their compelling and unusual coming-of-age novels. In conversation with Madhu Kaza. RESERVE A SEAT!$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLICAzareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novels Fra Keeler and Call Me Zebra, and an Assistant Professor in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, as well as residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, BOMB, and elsewhere. She has lived in New York, Los Angeles, Tehran, Dubai, Valencia, Barcelona, and currently splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy.Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The Journal, Ploughshares, Redivider, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is a 2017 “5 Under 35” honoree of the National Book Foundation.
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the co-editor of the recent anthology, What We Love, and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores the connection between translation and migration and which features immigrant, diasporic and poc translators. She directs the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page. NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating./\ /\ \/\/ \/\/ ..

Join us for a reading on India and caste with prize-winning novelist Neel Mukherjee and Sujatha Gidla, the author of the critically-acclaimed debut memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (FSG, 2017). Mukherjee's latest novel, A State of Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2018) follows the lives of five characters born to different circumstances in India navigating deeply entrenched class and caste divisions. In conversation with Gaiutra Bahadur, the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable in Andhra Pradesh, India. She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. The author of Ants Among the Elephants, her writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. She lives in New York and works as a conductor on the subway.
Neel Mukherjee is the author of two novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel.
Gaiutra Bahadur is the author of Coolie Woman (2013), a narrative history of indenture which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for political writing that is artful. Her short story "The Stained Veil" appears in the anthology Go Home!, co-published by Feminist Press and the Asian American Writers Workshop.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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